How many total episodes does Game of Thrones have?

How to get close to this number

Multiply seasons by a premium cable season length. Eight seasons at around ten episodes each gives eighty, and the later seasons were shorter than the earlier ones — which brings the total just below that. Premium cable runs even shorter seasons than basic cable, typically eight to ten.

The episode length trend in the explanation is the modern complication: episodes grew substantially longer in the later seasons, with the finale running well over eighty minutes. Counting episodes understates the later seasons and overstates the earlier ones, so an episode count is a poor proxy for how much television a show contains.

That inflation is a streaming-era effect even on a cable show. Without a fixed broadcast slot to fill, episode length becomes a creative variable rather than a constraint, and shows drift toward feature length. The Stranger Things question on this site shows the same pattern more extremely.